1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of offering discounts and rewards to consumers, and more specifically to associating an identification of a user via a card such as a credit card to an advertisement and offering rewards to members of a particular payment processing system based on situation information which can relate to a device, a consumer and location of that consumer.
2. Introduction
Payment processing companies such as American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Diners, etc. as well as specific banks such as Citibank, Chase, Bank of America search to differentiate themselves by offering exclusive offerings to their customers. American Express may offer a global discount to all customers at a particular merchant for using an American Express Card when transacting with the merchant. For example, American Express offers 5% off of all orders at a flower company by simply using the American Express. By employing this method, the Payment Processing Company delivers value to the Card Member and drives sales for the Merchant. All the while, the Card Company pushes more transactions onto the Credit Card. This method of promotion is standard in the industry but does not address a variety of merchant concerns. Specifically, the merchant is forced to offer the discount to every Card Holder despite the fact that the customer may have been willing to buy the product for the regular price and/or already decided to use the card of the card company. In a better scenario, the merchant seeks to offer the discount only to customers that qualify for a discount based on what that customer is doing and the location of that customer.
In addition to these global discounts offered by the Payment Processing Companies, a variety of companies are offering mobile discounts to consumers directly on their mobile device based on their location. In this scenario, the consumer would be pushed a virtual coupon to their mobile device. The consumer would then present this virtual coupon to the merchant. This method of promotion has not worked well since using the virtual coupon is difficult for the consumer, the clerk, and the merchant. The consumer finds it difficult to communicate the coupon to the clerk in the shop and the merchant Point of Sale system is not equipped to handle the coupon. Thus, this method improves the delivery of the offer to only location based customers but most merchants are not equipped to process the discount.
What is needed is an informal method of improving and simplifying the completion of a purchase transaction associated with location-based advertising.